Alan Kaufman's Blog

• How I Came To Write The Novel 'MATCHES'

  February 4, 2008

  • Many readers who know me only as a poet and memoirist may be rather surprised to learn that my first full-length fictional effort is about Israeli soldiers serving in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. How, they may wonder, did I come to write about Israeli soldiers? I am a bi-national, Israeli and American, and an Israeli army veteran. I touched on this briefly in my memoir Jew Boy, but did not ...
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• On Hubert Selby Jr., The Greatest Post-War American Writer

  February 3, 2008

  • "God and the Devil are struggling for the soul of man," Dostoyevsky wrote, "and the battleground is the human heart." That could well summarize the oeuvre of Brooklyn-born Hubert Selby Jr., who died in 1974. His last book "Waiting Period," built on the vision revealed in "Last Exit to Brooklyn," the 1964 novel with which he exploded onto the U.S. scene. That book was immediately hailed as a ...
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• A Brief Note On Beat Gravitas

  February 3, 2008

  • Irreverence, not piety, seems like the perfect sentiment to characterize the Beats. And yet, strangely enough, piety -- dictionary-defined for our purposes as awe, godliness, sanctity, holiness -- is precisely what Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the twin pillars of Beat sensibility, were most about. Some younger admirers don't like to admit that sarcasm was mainly not in the Beat repertoire; ...
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